LOST in Thought

[For the record, this post is about LOST.  So if you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading.  If you don’t care about LOST, you might not care.  But, as with so much else that I write, this isn’t actually about the subject at hand...]

Rise.  Life is in motion.  I’m stuck in line.
Oh rise.  You can’t be neutral on a moving train.
One day…these symptoms fade.  Think I’ll throw these pills away.
And if hope can grow from dirt like me, it can be done.

Won’t let the light escape from me.
Won’t let the darkness swallow me.
--Pearl Jam, “Down”

Six years of my life I gave, to varying degrees, to LOST.  At times I obsessively tried to follow clues through Lostpedia and random blog entries.  At times I swore I’d never watch the show again.  This past season was the first time I was genuinely ambivalent about the show.  It wasn’t asking any more questions, but it wasn’t really answering them, as it had promised.  It was just kind of…ending.

This was an idea that I greeted with equal parts happiness and horror.  There are really only two other TV shows that I have invested in like LOST: Babylon 5 and Scrubs.  In the end, all three shows were rewarding.  And in the end, both Babylon 5 and LOST made me cry at the end.

There’s this moment at the end of Babylon 5.  It comes during the end credits.  We see all the main characters in split screen, with one half at the beginning and the other half at the end.  John Sheridan has died.  The station has blown up.  But the moment that always catches me is the sight of Marcus, on the left side as the Ranger, on the right as a personnel file…dead.

Babylon 5 is strongly anti-religious.  In a weird way, the most concrete point we get to that is the indication that Marcus is just…dead.  But, really, the overall message is much stronger.  The angels and demons we worship turn out not to be supernatural, just super advanced, and most definitely handicapped by their own flaws.  We find out that the angels aren’t so pure and the demons aren’t so corrupt.  We also find out that, in the end, the gods don’t actually much care about the people they’re supposed to be fighting over.  They’re just a means to an end.

LOST…well…LOST went that same way.  It was, I think, more overt.  Jack spent the run of the show searching for his father, a man named Christian Shepherd.  When we first learned about Jacob I quickly put “Jacob” and “Christian Shepherd” together in their proper context.  The show finally, FINALLY, hung a lampshade on it in the very finale.

When we first met the Man in Black I named him Esau.  It seemed so apropos.  And when we learned that they were twins, that Esau was the favorite, but Jacob ended up with his birthright…

At the beginning of season 6, the episode where Ben killed Jacob, I made my Facebook status, “Consider my servant, Job.”  Ben had done everything he could in Jacob’s name.  Jacob had taken everything away.  Jacob didn’t fucking care.  And when we realized that the whole thing was just a game between Jacob and Esau…

Then, of course, there was the Dharma Initiative.  The doing of duty that leads to nirvana.

I’ve read some reviews and discussions of the final episode in the last couple days.  The thing that struck me with the first couple was the way the reviewers tiptoed around the issue of religious imagery.  One kept reminding his readers that he was an agnostic.  Another apologized for feeling the need to sing “Amazing Grace.”

Then I saw a couple reviews that were angry about it.  They were atheists, pissed about the fact that the LOSTies were sent to some sort of weird, wishy-washy heaven-esque eternity.

I gave up religion at the same time I found storytelling.  So at the same time I was turning my back on the literal supernatural, I was coming to see the narrative value of that same thing.  So all the religious under- (and over) tones of LOST bothered me not one bit.  I can’t imagine why anyone would be pissed that they were there, just as I can’t imagine why anyone would feel they had to apologize just for noticing and pointing them out.

Religion serves as a cultural touchstone of, well, culture.  It serves as a touchstone of society.  By placing a scene in a church I can say a lot about the purpose of that scene.

By putting a stained-glass window in a supposed church with symbols of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism it says you’re subverting a trope.  By making it the same church that acted as a cover for Eloise’s station that found the mysterious, moving island…well…

And what of that mysterious, moving island?  What of the fact that the entire goddamn island was a symbol of Buddhism?  It’s the Dharmacakra, the symbol of the eightfold path.

It’s the same image we see time and again as the symbol of the Dharma Initiative and in the lower left of that stained glass window.  And it’s what all the characters are searching for throughout the show: enlightenment.

In the end, too, Jack and Hurley become Bodhisattvas, given up the possibility of life, of rescue, to save others.  Jack chooses an insular route, attempting to save his friends and the island.  Hurley, we can only imagine, goes on to do something even greater.  Everyone seemed to notice the “Jack as Jesus” angle, but, in all honesty, “Jack as Bodhisattva” makes way more sense.  It’s a difference, I suppose, of degrees.  Jesus, it could be argued, was a Middle Eastern Bodhisattva.

But, really, it doesn’t matter.  Because LOST wasn’t really about the religious imagery it borrowed.

It was far more interesting to take note of how LOST completely and totally broke that religious imagery in the process.  I saw Jacob as a god-like character, Esau as the tempter.  In the end, though, we find out that all of the rules that the people on the island had to play by were invented by an annoying, whiny mama’s boy who just hated losing.[1]  We found out that Esau wasn’t really evil, he was just restless.

That bright, glowy, Holy MacGuffin?  That thing that everyone wanted to know the meaning of but that most people seem pissed didn’t really have any purpose other than as a radically unclever plot device?  Yeah…about that…

That bright, glowy MacGuffin was…are you ready for it?  The Meaning of Life.  The island’s rules were religion itself.  They were arbitrary, immature, invented by a child with no social skills who had never really gotten around to growing up and didn’t actually give a shit about people except to see how he could use them to win a bet with his brother.

Consider my servant Job.

There are many, many places where Babylon 5 and LOST intersect in my mind.  The fact that Mira Furlan is in both doesn’t hurt a bit, either.[2]  But there’s also the simple fact that, really, neither John Sheridan nor Jack Shepherd were the most interesting characters in the shows that supposedly revolved around them.  The two best characters in Babylon 5 were Londo and G’Kar.  The best character in LOST was Ben.  And all three played the exact same role: the scoundrel patriot who finds that all he worked for has come to naught and, in the end, he has lost everything.

Londo got the throne he’d so desired, but as a puppet of the servants of the devils he’d dealt with.

G’Kar got the respect and followers he’d desired, but after he no longer wanted them and had to leave to find peace.

Ben lost everything in exchange for nothing, not even a tiny bit of recognition from his self-absorbed master and, even after revenge and possible redemption found himself outside the church, unable or unwilling to take the few steps inside.

I wanted Londo to find happiness as emperor by the end.  I wanted G’Kar to find peace in his home.  I wanted Ben to walk in to that church.  But, in the end, I think their punishment fit the crimes they’d committed.  They got what they wanted, but only after it had turned to ashes.  And then they couldn’t forgive themselves or find any external agency to do it for them.  Of course with G’Kar and Ben it was still possible.  And that’s the hope that they carried forward, the lesson that they offer.

And everyone else, well, they needed each other to move on.  Sure, there were gaping holes in the pews at that final send off.  But, when you think about it, Ana Lucia couldn’t forgive herself and had never made the necessary connections to do so in the LOST universe.  Perhaps she did outside of it, though.  Michael’s only real connection was to Walt, but when we last knew of Michael and Walt, Michael was barred from his son’s life and died alone, trapped on the island’s purgatory.  Perhaps he could escape, perhaps not.  But he couldn’t go with the rest of the LOSTies.[3]  Miles, Faraday, Charlotte, Lapidus, Danielle, and Alex, well…we can hope that they had their own places of meeting to go to in the end, too.

That, in the end, is why I’m genuinely baffled as to why anyone would raise a stink about the religious imagery at the end of the series finale of LOST.  We’re told that they built that place of meeting together.  So they would have used common images to do so.  And, as I recall, more than a few of them had some idea of what that particular church represented: the way to find their way back to the island together in reality, the way to find their way to make the next step in the afterlife.[4]

And, really, we need each other to give life meaning out here in the real world.  We create that shared meaning through symbols.  For many that means religion, be it Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, Unitarianism…ah, hell, you get the point.  Even for those of us who aren’t religious the common touchpoints of religious symbolism hold meaning, even if those meanings aren’t actually transcendent in any way, shape, or form.  They’re quick shorthand to grasp an otherwise hard to explain concept.

This is where I’ve come…if not quite full-circle, at least to a point of release on the subject of religion.  There was a time when I, too, probably would have been mad that everyone met at a church at walked in to the light.  It probably would have been mitigated by the fact that I’ve never really expected anyone to tailor the world to my expectations of how something should begin or end.[5]  Erm, well, there was that one time.[6]

Now…well, I find that I’m annoyed by those I refer to as being “dogmatically non-religious.”  I don’t mean the people who assert that their life is meaningful without religion.  I don’t even necessarily mean the PZ Myerses or Richard Dawkinses of the world.  I get the impression that they find plenty of meaning outside of being vocally anti-religious and if all religion disappeared tomorrow they’d be happy to go on to other pursuits.

What I mean is the people who get pissed that there is religion or that popular entertainment would dare use any religious imagery (even the extremely watered-down sort used by LOST).  In truth, I think LOST could probably do more to subvert the idea of religion than even something like the extremely obviously atheistic Star Trek: The Next Generation.

By setting up Jacob as a character worth derision more than worship as soon as he steps out from behind the curtain, LOST invites us to question our views about god.  By setting up Esau as evil-because-Jacob-says-so we’re invited to question whether “evil” is really such a black and white concept.  By showing all of Ben’s machinations turn to ashes in his mouth LOST suggests we should ask if sacrificing everything to a “greater good” we don’t understand or question is really a good idea.

And, of course, by handing the island over to the most caring, the most humane, the most human of all the characters, LOST asks if maybe we should be looking to find a better set of rules than the ones we’ve followed for so very long.

So I suppose you could say I don’t begrudge LOST its religiously-tinged finale.  You could even say I loved it precisely for that.

Well, at the fact that it made me cry.  And it reminded me to believe in the power of, well, love and togetherness.

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[1]I found “Across the Sea” to be utterly terrible when I first saw it.  But, in retrospect, it was massively useful to understanding…well, everything.  Yeah, it had the terrible MacGuffin, but…wait…I’ll get to it in the main text.

[2]Seriously, my well-publicized love for Kristen Bell aside, I’d have to say that Mira Furlan is probably my favorite actress, like, ever.  She owned two absolutely crucial roles in two of the most important television shows of my life.  That’s got to be worth something, right?

[3]And, of course, Walt ain’t 11 anymore.  They probably could have dealt with that in some way, but…well.  And the actor who played Eko just didn’t want to be there, so there’s only so much they could do about that.

[4]I’m still not giving up my pet theory that the entire sideways universe was just Jack’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”-style dying fantasy.  In that case it makes about 1000% more sense.

[5]Seriously.  Expecting the last episode of LOST to ditch all the religious stuff it had built up at become militantly atheist just because you don’t like religion is stupid, silly, and juvenile.  It’s, well, it’s exactly like the religious folks who get mad about the rock music and the books that talk about sex and stuff.

[6]She still doesn’t talk to me.  Actually, I suppose that’s my own Ben moment.  Everyone I’ve met since Her isn’t good enough or doesn’t come around at the right time or whatever.  I spent a long time just sitting alone and trying to figure out what had gone wrong.  I was, basically, the scoundrel patriot, attempting to shape every single event, moment, and interaction towards my own end goals.  Perhaps I simply haven’t been able to forgive myself for that and I’ve just been sitting outside the church…waiting.

This is a Culture of Destruction

I like your medicine I like your birds and your bees Now don't you start thinkin' That you gotta buy the cure from them, sugar I know you know They're only gonna sell you the disease --RCPM, "I Know You Know" I spent the first twenty-five years or so of my life as a soldier in the middle of a war. No, seriously. You might think you've never heard of it, but there are books about my war all over the place and echoes of it nestled within the far-flung bits of literature you encounter on a daily basis. It's on the nightly news, buried in Reuters feeds, and on the pages of your newspapers. And lest you think that your average toddler can't fight a war, well the enemy didn't fight fair. The enemy attacked me, left me wounded, crippled, handicapped in a truly gruesome fight long before I figured out where the battlefield was or had the ability to reach it under my own power. And the weapon my enemy used to attack me in my most vulnerable state might surprise you. It was my father. That's what fathers do. My dad, in fact, was an alcoholic clown who beat me with his oversized shoes. All kidding aside, for a brief period one of my favorite books was John Eldredge's Wild at Heart, a guide of sorts to Biblical manhood. Or, at least, a variety of Biblical manhood that is seriously in vogue right now. And it's one that's probably extremely dangerous (as Matt Taibbi discovered in the Rolling Stone article linked above). I raised a tempest in a teacup over at Slacktivist and Right Behind over the last week. I wrote a couple of stories, basically on a dare, using characters from Left Behind. I don't consider myself a fanfic writer and I sure as hell don't think of myself as a slashfic writer, but it was an intersting idea to tackle and a chance to write on a subject I generally avoid (due, mostly, to knowing pretty much nothing about being a sexually active lesbian. Also, writing explicitly about sex is usually guaranteed to fail, since after a while I think all such writing devolves to a point where it reads like a manuscript written by a 15 year-old virgin. Oh, and just in case anybody wants to know, I don't even watch porn. It started as a religious injunction, but now is pretty much because I think it's massively stupid. Kind of like when I was younger and didn't watch scary movies because I thought I'd be, you know, scared. Now I don't because most of them are really friggin' stupid). The tempest was raised by one of the other regulars, who kept calling B.S. on me because I wrote the characters with daddy issues. This got a bunch of us started on the massive daddy issue industry that is modern evangelical Christianity. Now, then, fanfic itself is a wasted endeavor in my book. If I'm going to work with a character, I want it to be my own. In the case of Left Behind, though, it's an interesting exercise, since the characters read like the authors have never actually met a real human being, which is no mean feat. Normal, healthy, reasonable people do not act in the manner of the strange simulacra of people found in Left Behind and in my attempts to attach real motivations to the characters I unwittingly dredged up my fictional father issues. Fundagelical Christianity has written itself in to a corner. There's really no other way to say it. Guys like Eldredge are trying to write Christianity out of that corner and when I look at it from this side of the equation I begin to realize that they're doing a great deal of collateral damage. Most people go through a phase where they think that their parents are the dumbest fuck-ups in the world. It's usually called the teenage years. This, I believe, is a symptom of the twin vanities of adolescence and young adulthood. First, your average teenager thinks that they're the smartest person in the world. Second, your average teenager still sees the world in fairly black and white terms due to the wild, unchecked emotional development and non-worldliness that is the hallmark of modern youth. Now, unless the parent was an actual fuck-up or abusive, the teenager will probably grow up and learn that the world is not, in fact, black and white and that he or she did not, in fact, have all the answers. At some point in all of that the realization will come that, holy crap, my parent is a person just like I am and now that I'm an adult I realize that I was, in fact, the fuck-up. This is called growing up. It's why at some point pretty much every kid does something and realizes, "I'm turning in to my mother/father." It's why whenever adults talk about teenagers the conversation is punctuated with rolled eyes and shaking heads. Fundagelical Christianity, however, clings desperately to the black and white world of the self-righteous teenager. The Biblical injunction to enter the presence of the Christ with "faith like a child" is taken as a commandment to remain childish. When the real world with all its moral ambiguities encroaches on the black and white extremes of the adolescent world, fundagelical Christianity has no effective coping mechanism. When the wild dreams of the sheltered kid are shattered by the depressing realities of layoffs and infidelity and champagne tastes on a Keystone Light budget, there's no one to turn to, no one to blame, no inbuilt coping mechanism. See, god made all of these wonderful promises to the Chosen People. If bad things happen it can't be god's fault. It has to be someone else's and that leaves either the Devil or the self. But if in the moment of the acceptance of Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior you're given power over the princes and principalities of darkness, then something truly wrong has happened. Your weakness and failure must be the result of something residual from the before time, the time when the Devil reached you and made you a horrible, sinful person. Enter the Father Wound. Why no Mother Wound, you ask? I'm glad you brought that up. A vague Mother Wound is tacked on occasionally, in much the way that Freud added in the Elektra complex to counterbalance the Oedipal urge. But, ultimately, the man is in charge, so all failure is laid at the feet of the father. If the father does something bad, it's his fault. If the mother does something bad and the father isn't there to intervene, it's his fault. So it's all really the Father Wound. Neat, huh? The only solution to this universal disaster of the Father Wound is the Heavenly Father. You're supposed to let god be your daddy, claim your Biblical manhood or womanhood. Note that this isn't at all the same thing as growing up and claiming adulthood and it allows a perpetual adolescence and the eternal continuation of a perpetually navel gazing, childish faith upon which the rest of the world looks while rolling its eyes and sighing. The scary thing is, I'm not at all sure that anybody is really doing this with malice aforethought. I actually wonder if many, or any, of the practitioners of this psychological voodoo realize what they are doing. See, there's this strangely circular logic to this type of Christianity that it shares with any sort of system of thought built entirely on single-point solutions. If the only tool in the toolbox is a hammer, the handyman will tend to see nails (thanks to JayH for the image). In seeing that they're going to be fixed by a hammer no matter what, eventually the screws and staples will try to be nails. The analogy kind of breaks down here, but those nail-ified screws, if given a hammer and told to fix the table, will try to turn everything else in to nails eventually, too. This is the point of synthesis, at least for me. Because, you see, it was in the pages of John Eldredge's Wild at Heart where I first encountered the Golden-Haired Woman, a concept Eldredge borrowed from Robert Bly and Bly, in turn, borrowed from somewhere else (the Brothers Grimm, I believe). When a certain member of the female gender about whom I've spilled no small amount of digital ink first brought me to the place where I realized that I should give storytelling a try, my first two teachers were Joseph Campbell and my tattered memories of Wild at Heart. Campbell tried to take all of the world of myth and synthesize it in to a single narrative. Eldredge tried to take a single narrative and make the world of myth fit underneath its umbrella. Synthesis and exegesis. Campbell tried to fit everything under Freud's psychoanalytic concepts. Eldredge created this almost Freudian concept of the Father Wound going back to the very depths of childhood that needed to be worked through. Bly, meanwhile, tried to create a neo-manhood based in myth and storytelling. The overstory, the single myth we all constantly and subconsciously narrate in our own heads. Fiat Lex unwittingly provided the key for me to unlock this entire thought process earlier today. I believe that there is a universal story. Without a universal story, a shared experience, I don't think that the human race could interact. The necessary social grooming to maintain trade, to avoid or conclude war, to hopefully eventually combine forces to leave the cradle and find our place in the universe all rely on a shared experience. But the universal story doesn't create us, it comes from us. That is the key distinction between Campbell and Eldredge. But even Campbell's interpretation of the universal story falls short. The assumption of the universal story is in the case of Eldredge necessarily static. It is no more dynamic in Campbell, either, but because he seems to discount evolution and draws a circle with origin and terminus on a single point. It's where Bly is necessarily flawed, too. He creates a synthesized image of a new man, but bases the new man on the stories we've always told each other. We fall in love with the past too easily. We assume that the way things were is the way they will be, the way they should be. We know what the past is. It's understandable. But I've spent a decade dividing the female gender in to Golden-Haired Women and Gomers and I'm no closer to happiness now than I was my junior year of high school. I spent two years trying to convince a girl who didn't, who couldn't, to love me and accept me for who I was when I was incapable of doing so myself. I then spent seven months alternating between wondering what I could do to bring her back and trying to figure out how some other girl I'd meet along the way stacked up to her. Whose fault is that? Is it god's, her's, my father's? No, no, and emphatically no. It's my fault. And it's my responsibility to change it if I ever want to grow up. Does that admission, does that taking of responsibility instill manhood? I honestly don't know. I suspect that Eldredge would say, "No," because I haven't turned to god. I suspect Bly would say, "No," because I haven't engaged in a mythic act of initiation. Campbell might say, "Yes," but I think that this is kind of outside his scope. It doesn't matter, though. Whatever they say, I'm not listening. I'm not interested in manhood. I'm interested in adulthood. I'm tired of their stories. It's time for me to write my own.

Thalatta! Thalatta!

There was you, there was me Happily cast away by some mutiny We rum'd and strummed and drummed up our own treasure And every note he heard...did Poseidon pilfer every word?! We have lost the key; can find no rest, no rhythm, rhyme nor measure...(I recall...) --RCPM, "Bottom of the Bay" We begin with a mountaintop experience, told in the words of Xenophon (as translated by H.G. Dakyns. For the record, Xenophon wrote under an assumed name and referred to himself in the third person, which was then a fairly common technique for autobiographical tales): But as the shout became louder and nearer, and those who from time to time came up, began racing at the top of the speed towards the shouters, and the shouting continually recommended with yet greater volume as the numbers increased, Xenophon settled in his mind that something extraordinary must have happened, so he mounted his horse, and taking with him Lycius and the cavalry, he galloped to the rescue. Presently they could hear the soldiers shouting and passing on the joyful word, "The sea! The sea!" Thereupon they began running, rearguard and all, and the baggage animals and horses came galloping up. But when they reached the summit, then indeed they fell to embracing one another--generals and officers and all--and the tears trickled down their cheeks. And on a sudden, some one, whoever it was, having passed down the order, the soldiers began bringing stones and erecting a great cairn, whereon they dedicated a host of untanned skins, and staves, and captured wicker shields, and with his own hand the guide hacked the shields to pieces, inviting the rest to follow his example. The Ten Thousand, after a journey filled with hardship, death, and fear finally came to the sea, to the point of salvation. It is, as Robin Waterfield points out, the climax of the story of the March Up Country. From here on out it all is a falling action, but one tinged with sadness and loss. Salvation at the sea proved little more than a dream. Discipline fell apart and the Ten Thousand found themselves as unwelcome among the Greeks as they had among the barbarians. As Waterfield points out, it's a tale Xenophon tells with a purpose. These stories introduce one of the major themes of Xenophon's book. It is one of a number told by Xenophon of the Greeks' journey along the Black Sea that suggest how a community falls apart, and that underline Xenophon's own personal disillusionment, as one by one his dreams fail. Their arrival at the sea was meant to change the focus of the army. Their worst dangers seemed to be past; there was no longer the unrelenting psychological pressure of each man fearing imminent death. They expected to be safe, and as a result unity no longer seemed as essential as before. Their arrival at the sea was supposed to be an end, not a continuation of the uncertainties of the retreat; they were supposed to have come home, and not still be outsiders. I'm continually amazed at Waterfield's ability to tease the universal story out of Xenophon's work and, in the process, keep it specific to Xenophon's narrative. It allows me to stretch and work the metaphor without fear that the material will grow too thin and split or too brittle and break. I can start at the mountaintop experience of the Greeks' first glimpse of the sea, then, and connect it in a way to my own look at the Christian walk without fear of overstretching the bounds of sanity or credulity. Consider this, then, a preface of sorts to the Field Guide to North American Evangelists and a bridge between my own dissatisfaction with an unfulfilling faith and what I can only conjecture drives certain categories of my former co-religionists. The image of a host of Greeks collapsing on each other in a joyful embrace is not particularly alien to the Christian mind, nor is the idea of reacting to an extraordinary event with the building of a sacrificial platform. The Jewish Bible is filled with tales of patriarchs and leaders experiencing god in some way, then commemorating the event with the construction and dedication of an altar. The term "mountaintop experience," meanwhile, is one I chose specifically because of the connotations it invites in the contemporary Christian mind. Christian life in the modern United States is filled with events intended to create a sense of unity. Youth and adult groups go off on weekend retreats and withdraw into several days with no TV or video games and extended meetings for praise and worship and preaching. Churches send out short-term missions trips that are equal parts work and team bonding. Organizations host conferences and seminars that cater to bringing disparate groups of Christians together for the purpose of fostering church unity. The aftermath of these events is filled with discussions of how to extend these experiences back out in to the real world, accompanied by admissions that it's simply not possible, no matter how desirable. To borrow a line from The Razor's Edge, it's easy to be a holy man on top of a mountain. The would-be holy man or woman is left with two options: extend the experience by remaining atop the mountain or go back to the village in the foothills and be reminded constantly of the struggles of life. Here on the mountain overlooking the sea we find the source of both Xenophon's and the modern Christian's disillusionment. All of the efforts of the Ten Thousand had been focused on the journey to the sea and that destination as the point of salvation after which all would be well. In focusing on this momentary salvation, they ignored or did not realize the possibility that all would not be well on the shores of the sea, only to expend all of their strength and unity in the initial rush of discovery. The strange insistence in modern Christianity that all depends on the moment of acceptance as exemplified by the praying of "the sinner's prayer" or a tearful rededication in the throes of passion at a retreat works in exactly the same way. As with Xenophon's profound disappointment with the events following the first sight of the sea, the Christian then spends most of the rest of his or her life in the faith looking back fondly at the mountain that can never quite be reached again. The Ten Thousand took to terrorizing the Greek and half-Greek cities of the Black Sea coast, then splintered along traditional lines and ultimately found themselves the friends of no one among their brethren, a pattern which is mirrored in church history. Before there was a Bible there were the Paulines, the Gnostics, the Judaizers, and probably others. Before there was a Holy Catholic Church there were the Donatists, the Arians, the Pelagians, and a host of others. Then there was the Catholic Church and the Orthodox and the Anglican and the Protestants, who further split into the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and so on. Then came the fundamentalist split which gave us the Baptists and the loose collections of Bible and Evangelical Free churches. Now we're seeing the story told all over again with the Emergent Church claiming the mantle of certain truth in the midst of postmodern anxiety. Not only that, there are the half-breeds, like Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses and the alien, exotic religions like Islam and Hinduism. Each religion and each branch thereof claims to have the true answer, the real interpretation, the pure and unadulterated truth. Other groups, they might begrudgingly admit, sometimes have the right answers, too, or at least answers that are close enough to work. Ultimately, however, it all starts to seem a little too random, a little too divisive, a little too disappointing. The brilliant vista of the sea from a mile in the air atop a mountain gives way to cities with closed gates and fearful sentries, marauding bands of brigands and barbarians, and the slow, dawning realization that home isn't all it's supposed to be. We can understand, then, why Xenophon looked with longing eyes upon the land at a place called Calpe Harbor. It was a perfect place for a colony, rich with resources, between the important ports of Heraclea and Byzantium, and with enough space for a city of ten thousand or more. He had found Eden and, atop it, dreamt of the development of the spiritual city. But even his dreams were aimed in the wrong direction. Again I'll let Waterfield take up the tale: But in Xenophon's account the dream was tinged with a specific sadness. Calpe was to be a haven not just against marauding Bithynian tribes, but against time and change themselves. Calpe was where the army had reunified, and Xenophon dreamt that there his army could avoid not just physical disintegration, but the disintegration of values, the onset of amorality inspired by personal greed that Dexippus, Cleartus and Boiscus typified. The clash was between collective values, in which the individual supports the community by ruling or obeying as best he can and selfish values, in which an individual is simply out for all he can get for himself. Calpe, in Xenophon's dream, was to be a haven of virtue. Such is the tantalizing promise of the end of the world in the Book of Revelation. John holds up the city of man, as exemplified by Rome, as a place of chaos, impiety, and ill virtue, a greedy prostitute overflowing with all the vices most foul. In the end Rome is swept away before the glory of the New Jerusalem, a golden city lit by the light of the virtue of god himself and surrounded by a world of order and divine justice (the New Earth of the end of Revelation is depicted as having no oceans, an odd feature if you don't realize that to the Jewish mind the sea represented chaos, so the absence of a sea indicated order. This, too, probably highlights a clash of philosophy between Jews and Greeks and later Romans, for although the Romans were more willing to push up country than their cultural forebearers, they were still a maritime people who famously made the Mediterranean "a Roman lake"). To the early Christians this apocalyptic fever was very real and representative of something to come at any moment. After two thousand years of false starts and crushing disappointment, however, the promise of Jesus' return seems to be wearing a bit thin. The Millennial fever of Rapture Ready and Left Behind seems a desperate claim of false hope, a glittering dream city sitting atop the untamed wilderness of the seashore. All the while the church stumbles along an unfriendly coast, splintering in to smaller and small groups and all the while wondering what became of the promise of home. [Edit: Gravy. I should have proofread this one...]

Is That All It's About, Part 6

The saddest songs are the happiest The hardest truths are the easiest Put yourself to the test And tell me if you still need me And I will swallow these words See if I can still believe --Over the Rhine, "What I'll Remember Most" We've come (he says with a sense of forlorn hope) to the last stop on this little inner journey. It's a place I don't approach lightly, as this is the point of apocalypse, of change that cannot be unmade. At least, it was for me. This, as with everything I've put down in this series, is not the attack of an outsider, but an attempt by a former believer to make an account of the questions that kept him up at night. When all else failed, when all other faith seemed lost, I retreated to the centrality of the Christ story to see if I could make a final stand there. I couldn't. At least not in any way that's recognizable as a form of organized Christianity. If I may presume to borrow the words of scyllacat from a comment yesterday, "it turned out the Christians were right: Once I let 'the world' in, I 'turned from' Christ, but not because I denied that I was a sinner, or that I needed ideals and morals, but because their story--everything they'd PROMISED was true--just wouldn't hold up under any kind of scientific or historical scrutiny." I'd gotten tired of having my questions answered with, "You need more faith," or, "You need to study your Bible more," or, "You just need to find someone to mentor you." I began to suspect that those non-answers were an issue of existential fear. The standard response to any question based on human reason was, "The wisdom of god is folly to man." That's just a cop out, a way to end conversation and inquiry, probably because that inquiry goes to dangerous places. So let's go where angels fear to tread. The New Testament tells a chronological story. It starts with the Gospels, moves to the Acts of the Apostles, then goes in to the writings of those trying to put together the early church. Finally, the story literally ends at the end of the world. It's all quite neat. There's a reason for that. It was artificially created a good four centuries after the death of Jesus by the Council of Nicea. Up until the setting of the canon we now know, churches pretty much used whatever they wanted and whatever was available for teaching. Many of those non-canonical books remain. Some of them are even still in the Catholic and Jewish Bibles. Some of them tell stories of Jesus as a child, some of the fates of the apostles after the events in Acts, some are simply collections of quotations. But the Apocrypha, as the works are collectively called, is regarded as basically Biblical fanfic. The truth is somewhat more complicated. The first extant canonical works we have are the letters of Paul. His Damascus road epiphany aside, Paul never met Jesus. Yet the church owes its current setup and, to a large extent, very existence to the man. In this we could put Paul in the role of Xenophon; elevated to command out of nowhere following the death of a charismatic leader and forced to pull a disparate collection of conflicting ideologies together under a single banner. For Paul, the sea or home was what we would call Christian Orthodoxy.* Much like the Ten Thousand found they had wildly different definitions of home and few ended up there, anyway, nearly two thousand years have passed since Paul wrote his epistles and Christianity is farther away from a consensual orthodoxy than ever before and moving on an outward trajectory. We get insight in to the fight for orthodoxy in many parts of Paul's letters, but often not in ways we realize. For instance, one of the best known passages of the New Testament is 1 Corinthians 13, a homily on love that is often read in whole or part at weddings. The first three verses go thusly: "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing." This is not, as it's often interpreted, a warm and fuzzy reflection on the nature of love. It's a scolding. See, the church in Corinth was divided in to four camps: those who believed that excellent preaching was sign of god's favor, those who believed speaking in tongues was, those who believed prophecy was, and those who believed that god would elevate those who sacrificed all. This was Paul telling them all in turn, "Hey. Shut it." Throughout the Epistles we see evidence of Paul's turf war with a host of competing theologies. There were the Judaizers, who wanted Jewish "Christians" (as they weren't yet called) to stay and gentiles to become Jewish. There were the Gnostics, who believed in a special, imparted secret knowledge (undoubtedly taken from the Greco-Roman concept of the mystery cult). There were the ascetics, who believed that the goal was to withdraw from the world. He even had it out rhetorically with competing preachers, especially someone named Apollos who has no voice of his own that we know of. But Paul's role as adjudicator of orthodoxy leads to an extremely important question. Why does his say matter more than the Gnostics, Judaizers, or, for that matter, Apollos? For that we must go back to Xenophon (if I could marry an abstract concept, it'd totally be extended metaphor). Xenophon and Paul shared two particularly important qualities. First, they were each, in their own way, members of the aristocracy. Xenophon came from a wealthy, landowning Athenian family. Paul was a Roman citizen (which meant something, as citizenship wasn't exactly tossed out like candy at a parade for subject peoples of the Empire) from influential Tarsus and, probably more importantly, a Pharisee. In the Jewish world of the time, being a Pharisee was roughly analogous to being a member of the aristocracy anywhere else. It conferred upon the individual a higher status and the moral authority to tell others what to do. Second, while Xenophon pointed to a dream from Zeus as justification for his leadership, Paul laid claim to direct contact from Jesus on the Road to Damascus. This blessing from god combined with the general imperiousness of aristocratic background was a potent combination for both. We can, in fact, see the common results in the works of both. Xenophon was not shy to compliment his own leadership ability and compare it favorably to that of those he held in high esteem while denigrating anyone he didn't like as of lower quality than himself. Paul, meanwhile, would often affect an air of humility interspersed with exhortations to follow his example and be like him. And he wasn't above arguing with Simon Peter, the rock upon which Jesus chose to build his church, then crowing in a letter about how he'd won the day. Meanwhile, he was stitching together the church with constant travel and writing while nothing so organized was around to counter his sheer force of personality until the Gospels were put together and disseminated. The Gospels themselves are an interesting story. We don't actually know how they came in to being, even though they're widely regarded as being basically eyewitness accounts to the life and teachings of Jesus. This stands in contradiction to pretty much everything we know. The earliest canonical Gospel, Mark, came some thirty or forty years after Jesus' death, followed about a decade later by Matthew and Luke. Then, another or decade or two on, we got their half-brother, the Gnostic Gospel of John. In much the same fashion as the creation of the Torah, historians hypothesize a collection of earlier sources. To borrow the imagery of the prof I learned this from, imagine you're sitting down at your desk and about to write the Gospel of Luke. In front of you would be the Gospel of Mark, what I'm currently calling the "L Source" (I don't think that's right, but it serves as a placeholder), from which you'll get the material that's in Luke but not Mark or Matthew, and possibly a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus. Meanwhile, imagine that somewhere else in the Roman world your counterpart is sitting down to write Matthew. In front of him sits Mark, the "M Source," and possibly his own collection of quotations. The irony is, and this is sheer conjecture, since we don't know for sure, some of the books in the Apocrypha may well be source material for canonic Scripture. These three Gospels, meanwhile, are very, for lack of a better term (which I'm sure is out there), earthy and written with a Jewish mentality. Matthew begins with a genealogy. The earliest versions of Mark ended with the empty tomb but kind of left the idea of the resurrection up in the air. Luke reads like a lot of other histories of its day. But then we hit John. If Matthew, Mark, and Luke are earthy, John is ethereal. It opens with this high concept that in the beginning there was the word, and the word was with god, but the word became flesh and moved among men. And from there it moves in to territory heretofore unexplored in the Jewish Bible. In fact, I can now take a sharp detour and point out that Christianity contains many motifs that are simply lacking in its parent religion, but quite common in a neighboring belief system. So let's take a look at Zoroastrianism. Until that point, Zoroastrianism was a somewhat unique case in the world of religion and certainly Western belief. For one thing, it was based on belief instead of ritual (thanks to Robin Waterfield for that small but significant bit of insight). For another, it divided the universe in to two great spheres in constant conflict: good and evil. This should sound familiar. Judaism, by contrast, was a fairly conventional religion for all the innovation of its supposed, celebrated monotheism. The Jews, you see, weren't actually monotheistic. They were what is called "henotheists," a term given to those who believe in many gods, but reserve a special, privileged status for only a single deity. The Baals and Dagons of the ancient world were very much real to the writers of the Jewish Bible. They simply did not stand muster when compared to Yahweh. This particular attitude even makes it in to the epistles of Paul when he warns believers against eating meat sacrificed to idols, lest they bring ruin to a weaker co-believer due to the other's continued belief in the powers of the pagan gods (this would have been a great hardship to the Greek believers, as Greeks generally only got meat during pagan religious festivals). The Jewish world, meanwhile, revolved around the temple and the many festivals. The synagogue system familiar to modern minds wherein the religion is built around weekly fellowship meetings did not rise to primacy until after the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. The Jewish worshiper up until that revolution in thought had more in common with competing co-religionists than we realize. Yahweh's dwelling place on earth was limited to the Holy of Holies in the temple, much the same way that a pagan god's presence was limited to their temple or a particular idol. In both cases a professional class of priests handled the day-to-day duties of prayer, sacrifice, and keeping the people in contact with god while the laypeople largely went about their business, interrupted only by the requirements of the festivals and the occasional trip to Jerusalem/[insert non-Jewish holy site here] as dictated by the rules of their own personal tradition. So similar, in fact, was Judaism to neighboring religions that the Jewish history as recorded in their own National Epic is filled with episodes of slipping in and out of religious experimentation with neighboring gods. Biblical injunctions against homosexuality and prostitution, for that matter, may well have been an attempt to set Jewish ritual apart from their neighbors by banning temple prostitutes and the sexual ecstasy that was so often a part of ancient religious rite. In more obvious examples, the rule against boiling a calf in its own mother's milk that later became the kosher injunction against combining meat and dairy was a specific attack against a certain rite in another culture's religious tradition (which one in particular escapes me at the moment). How, then, did the very earthy religion of Judaism, which didn't even have a concept of an afterlife, give birth to Christianity? How did the corporate us v. them struggle of Judaism become the personal good v. evil struggle of its offshoot? The answer most often posited, which shouldn't exactly be a surprise, is Zoroastrianism. We get glimpses of this transition in the Bible itself, most obviously in the character of Satan. Although tradition indicates that the serpent in the Garden was the Devil hisownself, the first place we're explicitly introduced to him is in the book of Job, wherein Satan is quite simply indistinguishable from the being of pure, malicious evil we think of today. The Satan of Job is a familiar character in mythology, however. He's the Trickster, a sometimes malevolent, sometimes helpful, always devious character who isn't really one of the gods, but is allowed free passage at their courts for whatever reason and sows chaos wherever he goes, often getting hapless humans caught up in the wake of his schemes. So poor Job's life was ruined for the sake of a bet, a construct that seems odd to modern readers, but would have been accepted as a totally normal state of divine affairs by the ancient pantheistic religionist. By the time Satan shows up again, it's to offer the famous temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, as recorded in Matthew and Luke. Satan, again, is playing the role of Trickster, attempting to wheel and deal and distract Jesus as opposed to actively opposing him. In the Gospel of John, however, we see the first indications of the more sinister version of Satan, when Jesus calls him the father of lies and later he's directly said to have entered the mind of Judas before the famous betrayal in the Garden. The only place in the Gospels with a remotely similar idea of Satan to the book of John is a passage in Mark where the religious teachers accuse Jesus of casting out demons in the name of Satan. Even that doesn't quite offer the image of a universal, malignant evil, however. The image evoked by Jesus, instead, is one of a blasphemer, something that's still more consistent with a Trickster than a fundamental, universal evil. It's not until Revelation that Satan makes his final Biblical morph. Here we see him as the leader of all evil forces, marshaling his army against the righteous power of god. It's in the Battle of Armageddon that we see the influence of the eternal Good v. Evil struggle of Zoroastrianism fully realized, then quashed by the Jewish influence of the primacy of the most high god. From Job to John to Revelation, however, we never really get anything other than a highly symbolized, extremely fuzzy portrait of Satan. We owe our idea of who and what Satan is more to tradition, apocryphal sources, and, most importantly, a combination of medieval iconography and the poetry of Dante and Milton. It may be hard to believe, but the most complete picture of one of the most important individuals in all of Christianity was put together over a thousand years after the Biblical canon was closed in Milton's Paradise Lost. And Milton depicts Satan as a sympathetic character. To attempt to quickly sum up a disgustingly long point, we ignore the tweaks, twiddles, and extra biblical modifications to the Christian story at our peril. To those who lay claim to their view of Biblical truth as an outgrowth of faith, I can say very little. But those who claim in due course that the Biblical story is a matter of incontrovertible historical fact are simply incorrect in their assertions. The history, as is so often the case, is far more complicated than the story. And now that I'm looking at a four and a half page entry, I must breath a heavy sigh and leave Constantine to a future date yet again. Stay tuned. *Wow. Am I glad I wrote that Xenophon post before I came to this one. My next best option for comparison was Kurtz from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but that was a much, much harder to work and would have opened me easily to accusations of an anti-Christian bias. Plus, the more I think about it, the more I realize that Paul and Xenophon offer one of the coolest opportunities for an extended metaphor I've ever come up with.

Can it Truly be Our Song is Lost at Sea?

I'm not entirely clear how this is happening, but I keep picking up awesome books these days. Honestly, between The Measure of All Things, After Tamerlane, and Xenophon's Retreat, I can't remember enjoying books more. It seemed apropos to take yet another pause before deconstructing the New Testament and conversion of Constantine from a historical perspective because one passage of Waterfield's Xenophon's Retreat just fit the flavor of my last post perfectly. Now that I've been (enigmatically, might I add) called a hater of salvation, it's even more fitting. My goal here is to let Waterfield speak as much as possible without interruption, but I need to bring you up to speed. See, Xenophon's Anabasis was the tale of ten thousand Greek hoplites and peltasts (heavy and light infantry, respectively) hired by Cyrus, the brother of the Persian king Artaxerxes. Cyrus was not Cyrus the Great, the leader who basically made the Persian Empire one of the greatest of the ancient world, but certainly thought he should be. He built an army, including the ten thousand Greek (well, 10,400, but who's counting?) mercenaries, and marched on Artaxerxes. In the Battle of Cunaxa, Cyrus was killed, his Persian forces scattered or bought off, and the Greeks were left alone and friendless in a hostile, unknown land far, far from home. Tissaphernes, one of Artaxerxes lieutenants, promised friendship and free passage to the Greeks before betraying them and killing off most of their leaders. At this juncture Xenophon, heretofore an observer of the festivities, had a dream. In his dream, Xenophon saw a bolt of lightning strike his father's house and set it ablaze. The pious Xenophon saw it as a portent, and optimistically took it as a sign that Zeus was going to elevate his house and that Xenophon was to provide illumination and the path home to the lost and listless Greek mercenaries. So began the march down country and the real centrality of one of the greatest adventure stories ever told. And here I would like to step back and let Robin Waterfield shed illumination on the Greeks' world. It was Xenophon's intention to lead his men 'home', or to rejoin 'the Greeks'. Under any circumstances, but especially theirs, the word 'home' carries a potent charge. But the army consisted of men from all over the Greek world: the majority were from the Peloponnese; others originated in central and northern Greece, in Crete and Cicily and the Aegean Islands, and in Asia Minor. Many had formed attachments with places or people in the east itself. Where, then, was 'home?' (We move here in to the Greek history of colonization, which I will leave out for the sake of brevity.) By the time this stream had slowed to a trickle, there were around 1500 Greek communities and the Greek world extended all over the Mediterranean and the Black Sea; the traditional phrase was 'from the Phasis River to the Pillars of Heracles', the Phasis being in modern Georgia and the Pillars of Hercules being what we call the Straits of Gibraltar. In Plato's memorable image the Greeks were scattered around the coastlines of the known world 'like frogs or ants around a pond'. The Greek world had no clear centre: what stood duty for the centre was the sea. Through trade and colonization they had made the coastlines their own: everywhere they went, they could expect to be able to communicate with fellow Greeks, with only minor local variations in accent and dialect. They were always wary about travelling too far inland from the sea. Even on the Greek peninsula, the mountainous inland separated rather than united communities, and turned eyes away from the land and towards the sea. Every visitor to Greece recognizes the limpid beauty and emotional power of the sea: the jold of delight at the sight of turquoise shallows and purple depths, half-glimpsed rocks, and patches of weed. When Xenophon told his men that they were going, 'home', then, he meant that they were going to find the sea. That was where they would rejoin the Greek world. (Here we get a glimpse at the possibilities held out for colonization by the Ten Thousand, including the possibility of just settling down in the Persian heartland and daring Artaxerxes to kick them out. Then there was the idea of putting down a colony as soon as they reached the Black Sea and the idea of going home, then heading back out, all of which came for naught.) For all of Xenophon's rhetoric about getting 'home' to wives and children (or 'children and wives', to use the usual, telling Greek order), and for al the men's expressed desire to do just that, the irony is that in the end extremely few of them made it home...Within the time-fram covered by Xenophon in The Expedition of Cyrus, only a few hundred men trickled away from Byzantium and returned to their native lands. And this small group of men included none of the protagonists, who died, disappeared, or re-enlisted in the east to fight against Tissaphernes again, back where they had started. Xenophon's dream of fire was after all about the loss of his family home, not about its glorification. I'll pause here, just to let that resonate. "Xenophon's dream of fire was after all about the loss of his family home, not about its glorification." See, Xenophon probably never returned home to Athens. It was the Greek world after the Peloponnesian War and he had famously colluded with Spartans, a crime worthy of an exile that was never lifted. Moreover, were he to return home to Athens, he would not have found it the same as when he'd left. Xenophon had been a follower of Socrates and had even asked the great philosopher's advice before heading out to join Cyrus. But the Athens to which he could not return was the Athens that had sentenced Socrates to drink hemlock. But, again, Waterfield says it better than I can. What went wrong? Was talk of 'home' mere rhetoric? Whatever happened on the expedition itself, by the time Xenophon wrote The Expedition of Cyrus, it was subtle rhetoric indeed. By making 'home' the Pole Star of the retreat from Cunaxa, he draws our attention to the fact that we cannot give a precise answer to the question of that home's whereabouts: it might have been the sea, but the communities on the Black Sea let him down; it might have been wherever the men came from, but they came from all over the Mediterranean. This openness turned the tale Xenophon wrote into an archetypical search: like Homer's Odyssey, it is the story of a journey "home" against terrifying obstacles; like the Odyssey it resonates with any journey home and with every reader's deep desire for security. As such it has been used as the basis for both fictional and non-fictional treatments of the theme, from Walter Hill's 1979 film The Warriors to accounts of similar treks in World War II and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I'm loathe to skip over the next couple paragraphs, but I feel I ought. It's an excellent look at the dichotomy of how the Ten Thousand needed the identity provided by home but could not find it due to the fact that they were constantly on the move. They needed most what they could not find because of their desperation to reach what they needed most. So instead we'll depart from Xenophon's Retreat with these words: To the west, east, and south, then, lay the certainties of civilization, indicated by proper roads -- but in those directions lay also the certainty of death. The Greeks chose uncertainty; they chose to enter the chasm of the mountains. They were already more or less lost, but they had to get more lost to stand a chance of finding themselves safe. And thus we find ourselves at that old, familiar place: the beginning of the Hero's Journey. This particular Hero's Journey, however, reads backwards from the end, so we already know how it goes. There is no home to which they can return after defeating the nonexistent dragon and plundering its treasure trove. Xenophon does not return to Athens, hailed as the mighty successor to Perseus and Theseus and Herakles. Instead he finds the gates of the city shut and familiar faces regarding him as a traitorous enemy. Where, then, is home? Where, then, is salvation? The questions often asked and left unanswered in Xenophon's tale resonate, even with those of use who never were and never will be lost and alone a thousand miles from home and pursued by a relentless enemy. So to answer the challenge laid before me and claimed as my own words, no, I do not hate salvation. I, like everyone on this terrestrial ball, seek salvation. But just as Xenophon realized too late that his own dreams of fire from heaven were not a promise of gain, but a portent of loss, I do not, can not dream of Revelation fulfilled. The dreams of fire so often called a wonderful promise in the world I once occupied I now take as a deep and grevious loss. I do not need to go on a Hero's Journey to know that somewhere out there is my home. I will not fight if I don't have to, but it is my right to defend my home from those who approach with torches and malicious intent. Meanwhile, I'm told that I put too much faith in people and not enough in god. This is delivered as an indictment and not for the first time, either. I don't think it's particularly surprising that the people who say that are the ones with the most disdain for people. Just know, I take your scorn as a compliment. In general, I like people )although I'm willing to make exceptions for individuals who want to set my home on fire). I think we're our only hope. So, in honor of Xenophon's star-crossed journey to the sea, I leave with this: Alone, adrift, together are we Slowly sinkin' in a deep blue sea But we smile and we wave And we say, "I'm afraid...and I love you...and here we go..." --RCPM, "Leaky Little Boat"

Is That All It's About, Part 5

Oh, so many road signs we ignored So many sermons we deplored We got obnoxious, lazy, unruly and crazy Just to keep from gettin' bored You know the Rebel Soul is its own reward --Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers, "Junebug in July" I limped in to my final semester out at Western with a faith that I was barely holding together and not entirely sure I wanted any more. The problem was that I was invested. I wasn't sure what I'd do with a B.A. in history if I didn't stick with my plan to go to Seminary. I knew I would lose friends, some of whom mattered dearly to me. And, of course, there was a girl (there's always one of those, isn't there?). Even though it would still take me nearly a year and a couple more iterations of Christianity to admit it to myself and another few months after that to "go public," I was at the end. And I know exactly what the final straw was. I started looking at the Bible and the Christian story through the eyes of a historian. Christianity in most of its traditional forms is built on a certain shared set of assumptions. True, you might have the more liberal Presbyterian or UCC churches saying that homosexuality is okay and women can be head while the conservative fundamentalists will say no such thing, but they'll probably agree on a lot more than they disagree. Those agreements, in turn, are founded on the central assumption that the Bible is at its core an accurate historical text. This has to be a core assumption, because the entire faith is rooted in the story of god's hand guiding the Jewish people and leading to the moment of Christ's ministry and sacrifice. The problem is that the Bible's claim to historical accuracy is problematic at best, mostly because it's based on Biblical claims to the Bible's own accuracy. The, "Because I said so," argument may work when disciplining a small child, but it doesn't hold up in research. However, for those within the Christian tradition, these Biblical claims create a set of shared assumptions that are rarely, if ever, questioned. The three main ones are, "The Bible is god's word," "God doesn't change," and, "The Bible doesn't contradict itself." The third one is the more frustrating, because it's generally used as a conversation ender in those cases where the Bible very obviously does contradict itself. The second is more subtle and requires a bit of Biblical scholarship to get around, but it's totally untrue. In the Torah and the histories, god is an often cruel and capricious anthropomorphic tribal deity primarily concerned with flexing his muscles to show his strength by slaughter. The prophets mark a shift to an ineffable deity more concerned with social justice than slaughter (compare, for instance, the treatmnt of Egypt in Exodus to the treatment of Assyria in Jonah. God slaughters the innocent firstborn of Egypt just to prove he can while using Jonah's hatred of Assyria to amplify his own compassion). The New Testament then marks a shift to the incarnational, suffering deity, before shifting back at the tail end to the bloodthirsty conqueror motif. The first assumption, meanwhile, serves as an all-purpose answer to any questions. This doesn't make sense? Well, it's god's word and god's smarter than you. These three main assumptions are then surrounded by a cloud of smaller assumptions that I gave the shorthand descriptor of, "The Bible says..." to. See, at some point during an interaction about Christian living with a Christian, they'll probably say, "Well I know the Bible says to [insert activity here], but/so..." A lot of these things are stuff that the Bible says, like, "Love your neighbors," or something. But I've been in a lot of conversations involving what the Bible says where I ended up thinking, "Really? I don't recall the Bible saying that." But it's taken as a given by the speaker and often the listener with absolutely no citation. It's actually kind of fun to respond to someone who says, "The Bible says..." with, "Really? Where does it say that?" Try it some time. You'll find out a lot about the person depending on how they answer. Either way, the basic assumptions at the core of Christianity don't really jibe with reality.* I take any discussion this from four basic points: the Documentary Hypothesis of the origins of the Torah, the similar haphazard construction of the New Testament, the nature of apocalyptic writing, and the myth surrounding Constantine's conversion to Christianity. The first three directly question core Christian assumptions about the Bible itself while the fourth hits the core myth of Christianity as an inevitable foundational part of Western civilization. The Documentary Hypothesis is a deconstruction of the Torah according to hypothesized original sources. It looks at linguistic and thematic composition as well as the use of the name of the deity and posits four different sources for the origin of the first five books of the Bible. The sources are the "E" source, so called because of the name Elohim for god, the "J" source for the use of Jehovah (which is itself a German mistranslation of Yahweh), the Rabbinical source, so given for the redactions which probably came from the later Rabbinical tradition, and, finally, the book of Deuteronomy, which I think is given the term the Deuteronomical Source, but I don't remember. Now, this is a very quick and dirty overview, so I'm not going to go in to tremendous detail, but if anyone out there is interested I can offer greater explanation of things at a later point in time. For the moment, though, I want to make two points. First, the primary difference between the J source and the E source is an issue of refinement. Historical scholarship widely holds that the separate sources are an attempt to integrate two systems and it represents a shift from an older tradition of worship of El to Yahweh. In this, it's roughly analogous to the stories of the wars between the Olympians and the Titans in Greek mythology, which were likely an attempt to explain a paradigm shift between an old and a new tradition. The Titans, in turn, supplanted the primal gods, which probably represents an even earlier shift. Either way, the use of El is all over Jewish tradition, right down to the name of their state (Isra-El, anybody?). El was, himself, an ancient Mesopotamian/Mediterranean deity who probably made it in to Jewish tradition as Elohim and was also the mythological father of Baal. This probably explains a thing or two about why Baal was the standard Biblical whipping boy... Second, the story of Deuteronomy is interesting in and of itself. According to the histories, King Josiah, one of the later kings of Judah and one of the ones who was regarded as pious, ordered the Temple cleaned and rededicated. The scribes miraculously managed to find a lost book and Josiah ordered it read to the people so they could be properly instructed or something. This miraculously discovered book is widely believed (or, possibly, canonically said, I honestly don't remember at the moment) to be Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy occupies a weird niche in the Torah, meanwhile, and shares far more in common with the book of Isaiah than it does with the rest of the books with which it is grouped. Isaiah, or, more accurately, the people who wrote under the name Isaiah, were contemporaries of Josiah. It's a head scratcher, don'tcha think? Isaiah, meanwhile, is as good a point to get in to the nature of apocalyptic and prophetic writings as any. It, along with Daniel and maybe Jeremiah does not seem to be written by a single author. Historians (of faith traditions as well as non-faith) sometimes divide Isaiah into two and explicitly call them First and Second Isaiah. Daniel, meanwhile, has a drastic shift in the middle. The first few chapters are the familiar stories of the Fiery Furnace and the Lion's Den. Then it switches over to a collection of stories about dreams and dream interpretation, including one dream in which Daniel predicts the rise of Alexander the Great, his campaign, and the breakdown of his empire in to the successor kingdoms. This would have been a great accomplishment of prognostication from someone who probably lived during the consolidation of the Persian Empire long before the Battle of Marathon. It wasn't so great, however, for, say, a subject of the Seleucids (one of the primary successor kingdoms) writing under Daniel's name, as was probably the case. Ancient writers, you see, didn't so much have the same concept of intellectual property we do and would often write under an assumed name or take the name of a previous writer in order to give their own work greater prestige. This has the effect, however, of wildly distorting our concept of the Bible's predictive abilities, which is something we shouldn't overestimate, since the book of Daniel offers a stunning example of the Bible's capacity to be a completely inaccurate historical document. See, Daniel records the switchover to Persian rule of Babylon. It says that he hung out with Nebuchadnezzar and then Belshazzar in the final days of the Chaldean (Babylonian) Empire, then Belshazzar was assassinated and Darius the Mede took over. Following Darius's takeover, Daniel got to have the fun of the lion's den, then became a favored officer of the king. The book of Ezra then claims that in the "first year" of the reign of Cyrus of Persia (which the Bible I'm currently looking at hilariously footnotes as 538 BCE), Cyrus decided to allow the Jews to return home and rebuild their Temple and gave them a bunch of stuff to do it to boot. This is a completely, totally, and utterly impossible time line. Babylon fell to the Persians in 539 BCE. The king was Cyrus the Great, and he was many, many years in to a reign in which he had elevated his kingdom from a minor power with great potential to one which would span from Afghanistan to the borders of Egypt. He lived many years after the conquest of Babylon before dying, at which point his son took over and shortly thereafter died in battle. After a brief period of upheaval, the empire fell under the command of Darius I. Darius consolidated control of Egypt, conquered Turkey, and pushed in to Europe proper, but for all his skill he is mostly known as the king who presided over the Persian loss to an outnumbered force of Athenian and Platean hoplites at the Plains of Marathon. He did actually put in to place the system of satraps over which Daniel was apparently appointed to preside, but this one bit of historical accuracy really doesn't make up for the many, many problems with the rest of the setup. But I digress... Anyway, the propensity of later writers to place their work under the names of earlier authors has given us an overinflated sense of the Bible's predictive ability. This, when combined with a largely misunderstood or misrepresented trend has created one of the greatest difficulties in properly placing the Bible in context. I speak here of apocalyptic writings. Apocalyptic books were the sci-fi of their day. They attempted to confront issues or address grievances that would get the reader angry or the writer in trouble if they were taken head on by switching context. In this they often functioned as political screed, too, attacking rulers and powerful administrators obliquely and in code. The best known of all apocalyptic writings closes out the Christian Bible and is known to all as the Book of Revelation. The imagery in Revelation is so powerfully misunderstood that nearly two thousand years after the writing of the book we've got Jack Van Impe on TV telling us that the European Union is the ten-headed beast from the sea (or, at least, he was saying that when there were 10 nations in the EU. I don't know what he's saying now). We've got books like Hal Lindsay's Late Great Planet Earth confidently proclaiming the coming apocalypse (in, like, 1992) and LaHaye & Jenkins selling millions of copies of the Left Behind books while at least some of their readers claim that the books are accurate representations of how the world will end (I shit you not. I could tell you a specific situation in which an otherwise intelligent person made that claim directly and I probably have a lot of stories where it's between the lines). And while these latter day Daniels attempt to discern exactly what collection of evil nations comprise the seven heads and ten horns (and why god didn't see fit to mention his own country, the New Israel, the great, god-fearing land of 'Merica while he was making everything else so damn clear), they totally ignore the most likely possibility. Let's say, for a moment, that you're a Jewish-minded ancient Roman. You write a book and include in it a prostitute named Babylon, a great capitol that proclaimed its might and then fell, and put her on top of a seven-headed beast which is covered with blasphemies against god and from which many waters flow. Let's say you're trying to do it to make a point. Which is more likely, that you're trying to warn people a couple millennia in the future to watch out for the European Union, or that you're making a not so veiled attack against a certain imperial capitol that's famously built on seven hills and to which it is said that all roads lead? Just for giggles, let's break down the image presented. Rome's pantheon of gods was an affront to the one true god of Judaism and Christianity. Romans, meanwhile, called Jews and, later, Christians atheists due to their determined non-acceptance of Roman gods. There wasn't quite the widespread persecution we've been told about (Christians being eaten by lions happened, but [insert powerless people group] v. wild, exotic animals was a popular spectacle at the games and should in no way be construed as a systematic attempt to wipe out Christians), but there was plenty of animosity and a bit of open conflict, but most of that was Jews v. Romans (Masada, the Bar Kochba Revolt, the destruction of the Temple and subsequent diaspora, the Sicarii as an organized group of assassins whose aim was to kill enough Romans so they'd leave, etc.). Still, plenty of early Christians were, themselves, Jews or tried to append Jewish law to the new faith. Rome was built on seven hills and for the Jewish people would have been the spiritual successor to Babylon, so evoking the image of Rome as Babylon would have functioned as powerful propaganda. Roads and rivers, meanwhile, are interchangeable images of commerce and the trade of ideas. Rome was the crossroads of the ancient European and Mediterranean world and built a network of roads that still impacts the world today. It wasn't a great port city, but a city that sat "on many waters" would have been one with a great deal of maritime commerce and strength, exactly the image evoked by the phrase "all roads lead to Rome." To make a short summation of an overly long point, it's probably safe to say that we can ignore Van Impe and Hal Lindsay. I'm pretty sure the apocalypse happened right about the time Attila the Hun sacked Rome... And, on that note, I'll have to cut this disgustingly long post off. I'll leave the composition of the New Testament and the tale of Constantine's conversion for a future post... *This should not be construed as an attack on faith. Just as historical record cannot prove Christianity, it cannot and should not negate faith. The very gaps through which I exited can be used as an entry for another. What I do believe the nature of historical speculation of Scripture should do is remove the smug self-certainty of those who equate faith with certainty and believe it's possible to empirically prove the existence of god and the primacy of their religion just because it's in the Bible.

Is That All It's About, Part 4

Baby just don't lie to me You know I thrive on jealousy I boil it down to simple pleas Baby just don't lie to me --Local H, "Simple Pleas" I developed a saying sometime during my time at Western Illinois University. "If it wasn't written down, it probably didn't happen. If it was only recorded by one source, it probably didn't happen the way we think it did." This particular bit of cynicism doesn't come from the study of history, per se, it comes from the process known as historiography, also known as the history of the study of history. History is a complicated process. Those who only took the necessary, required amount of history probably don't see that. I didn't see it until I was taking three and four hundred level courses. Until then it was just a bunch of facts, regurgitated on to bits of paper when the time called for them. It's because history has largely become standardized for the K-12 and general requirements club. The Metric System of the history game is the textbook. Textbooks offer a distilled, sanitized version of history. We get the important dates: 1066, 1492, 1776, etc. We get the important people: Julius Caesar, Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson and whatnot. What we don't get is the conflict and controversy. That is starting to change, but it, too, is getting a lot of resistance. Textbooks and history teachers now dare to offer controversial topics and, at least in America, controversy is usually followed by accusations of nonpatriotism from certain conservative elements. This is because teaching history as a somewhat scientific discipline is, well, new. There is an old saying that goes, "Winners write the history." This carries with it certain connotations, such as the idea that the winning side will then glorify itself while making the enemy in to a villainous mob. Hindsight is, after all, often the best justification for anything. I was reminded of this yesterday while visiting one of my favorite museums. The University of Chicago maintains a small museum of Middle Eastern antiquity known as the Oriental Institute. It's small, yes. I was only there for a couple hours and got everything I wanted out of the visit. But it has a wealth of artifacts and information from one of the premier institutions of higher learning on the topic, including many of the wall panels from the Assyrian palace of Sargon (um, Sargon II, I think). Sargon himself didn't really make it in to the Bible, but his people did, especially his son, Sennacherib. Assyria functioned as something of a bogeyman for the Israelites during the period of the kings and the split state of Israel and Judah. They attacked and destroyed the northern kingdom and were driven off from the very gates of Jerusalem by Yahweh after a change of heart by Hezekiah (I recall. It's kind of fuzzy and I don't feel like looking it up). There was, too, the interlude where Jonah went to Ninevah, the Assyrian capital, preached away, and the Assyrians repented of their evil ways, thereby pissing Jonah off, mostly because he'd really, really wanted to see the wrath of heaven poured out over the city. When I was in church and the subject of the Assyrians came up, it was inevitable that we'd hear how bloodthirsty and cruel they were. I have no doubt that they were fully capable of such things. One does not create an empire by being cuddly. However, the Assyrians were probably no more bloodthirsty and cruel than anyone else was, up to and including the Israelites, whose own National Epic is filled with all kinds of slaughter. The thing that gave me pause in the Oriental Institute was not, however, the 40-ton man-headed bull statue that once guarded Sargon's throne room. It was a small chunk of the Epic of Gilgamesh, mounted on a plaque and accompanied by a translation. Gilgamesh was the Mesopotamian Theseus or Beowulf, a mythical king from before the beginning of time who may or may not have been real but was somehow larger than life and the greatest of all heroes. Gilgamesh's Epic was the common root of the Mesopotamian National Epics and so was around during the Babylonian Captivity of the Israelites during the 6th Century B.C.E. Many point to the Flood of Noah as possibly being taken from the Epic of Gilgamesh, who had a similar tale. Oddly enough, I've tended to not entirely buy that. Noah's flood was quite different from Gilgamesh's. The Noahic Flood was actually somewhat closer in theme to a Greek flood myth, which tended to make me think that there might have been a catastrophic Mediterranean flood at some point well before recorded history that the Greeks and Jews both remembered in their own way. Another possibility was that for cultures who lived and died by the sea, floods were simply a way of life and the Flood Myth was repeated simply because of the power it had over an ancient people who didn't fully understand the power of water but really, really needed it. Anyway, I was reading the translation of a chunk of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I don't remember it exactly, but it was about a woman laying down at the feet of, um, either a god or another mythological hero, said male figure seeing that the woman was quite desirable, getting it on with her, and this activity leading to the birth of Gilgamesh. What shocked me, though, was that I suddenly realized I was reading the Biblical story of Ruth. See, Ruth was a non-Israelite who married an Israelite who then died. Ruth's mother-in-law went home and Ruth followed. A kinsman of the dead husband, Boaz, took pity on them. After a while the mom-in-law hatched a plan. Boaz had had a bit too much to drink, Ruth got herself made up all pretty-like and went and laid at his feet. In church we were always told that no hanky-panky happened and Boaz, who was drunk enough to pass out on the threshing floor, just realized that this Moabite tart lying at his feet was actually a good prospect for marriage. Right. Anyway, Ruth got pregnant and gave birth to Obed. Obed had a son named Jesse. Jesse had a bunch of sons. The runt of the litter was a shepherd boy named David. David would become King David, the possibly mythological Biblical hero of the Jewish people.* David, meanwhile, had a son named Solomon, who took the Israelite Kindgom to its zenith and was the envy of everyone. Except there's almost zero mention of Solomon outside of the Bible, with the possible exception of a depiction on an Assyrian obelisk, in which the figure identified as Solomon is kneeling before the Assyrian king (also located in the Oriental Institute). Oh, and just in case anyone is wondering, both David and Solomon had a descendant who is rather more well known than either one: Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus, rather famously, had a mother who was mysteriously impregnated by a god, which was not an altogether uncommon motif of the day. Speaking of Jesus, there's some doubt as to whether or not he actually lived. We only have the Gospels, which kind of fall under that category of a single source and therefore unreliable account. The trump card that's always played by Christians who want to argue for historical validity is the Roman historian Josephus. He mentioned Jesus, so there. Jesus existed and the Bible is totally right. Except I used Josephus extensively as a source for a paper on the Maccabean Revolt. I also used the books of the Maccabees and I noticed something. Josephus basically copied the Maccabees, but stripped them of the Jewish religious context for a Roman audience. This, at least in my book, pretty much strips Josephus of credibility as an independent second source. That's the nature of historiography. A lot of ancient sources worked like that. They simply copied something written by someone before, but with changes for context, if not necessarily independent research. To someone who isn't a historian, though, that sort of thing isn't really self-evident, mostly because they aren't studying the events, they're studying the story about the event. It's sometimes hard to tell the difference. Then the concept of Biblical archeology pops in to muddy the waters still more. See, the Bible mentions a bunch of places where towns existed. Not surprisingly, there are signs that there were, in fact, town in those places. There is a cottage industry of people who basically call themselves historians but aren't who then turn around and trumpet the archaeological findings as proof that the Bible is totally accurate. I actually handled this topic back in my third post. Yes, Virginia, there was a Troy. But there probably wasn't a ten-year war fought over a misunderstanding about a woman. Is is possible, though, that there were decades or possibly centuries of raiding and skirmishing and maybe outright war over trade and access to the Black Sea? Hell yeah. And here I hit the point where I realize this is a really long post and I haven't even covered the Documentary Hypothesis or the nature of Apocalyptic Writings, nor have I broached Constantine, Eusebius, and the three accounts of the mythological foundation of the Church at the core of the later Roman Empire as recorded by two historians. Oy. To be continued, I guess... *As a sidenote: shepherd boys turned kings are a pretty common theme in antiquity, generally with the construction of royal parents receiving a vision of destruction on the eve of the child's birth and leaving said child to die. Only the child is rescued in some way and raised by shepherds only to accidentally fulfill the prophecy when it's pretty obvious that the whole thing could have been avoided if the parents had just kept the kid. Oedipus Rex is founded on this concept and probably borrows from Homer's Illiad and the backstory of Paris. In a story like Oedipus the point is pretty much, "You can't mess with Fate." However, it's entirely possible that the King David story is actually a precursor to modern tales like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where the simple country folk go to the seat of power and wow the big city politicians with their homespun wisdom and manage to make real, important changes.

Is That All It's About, Part 3

You know this year was a blur I think I know you but I'm not sure If I don't know I don't care I only took you home on a dare It's only livin' now It's all I'm given We're only livin' now A quarter to seven Hits me with the bright lights --Local H, "Blur" The movie Big Fish is a beautiful illustration of the point I've been trying to make with this little interlude. If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend going to watch it. Like, now. Seriously, it's an amazing movie and I'm about to spoil it like a steak left on a sidewalk in July. See, Big Fish is a movie about reconciliation and understanding. It's a movie about the stories we tell ourselves about growing up, growing old, and finding love. It's also a movie about the very roots of myth and fairy tale. I don't remember any of the character names, so I'm just going to use the actor's names here. Ewan McGregor's character is the prototypical mythological figure, especially since he historically exists, but is mostly a construct of Albert Finney, the storyteller. He goes through the hero's journey exactly as if Joseph Campbell himself had written the script. Along the way he meets the various stock characters and locales of myth and tames them in the way of the hero. Meanwhile, we have Billy Crudup playing the role of the historian, attempting to chase down the fact behind the myth like a modern-day Schliemann. There are two moments when he encounters the myth and we see behind the story. The first comes when he finds the little town that represents paradise and discovers that the young girl is also the old witch. When Crudup is unable to understand the concept, she gives one of the greatest answers in the history of myth. In his father's world there were exactly two women: his wife and everybody else. In this, too, we understand that his wife is actually the goddess, but I'll get back to that in a moment. The second moment where myth and reality converge is the funeral scene, where we see all of the characters who populated the father's myth and discover that they were, in fact, real. They just weren't quite as, shall we say, super sized as they became. But we can make that inferential leap from the really tall man to the giant and the Asian twins to the two-headed Korean singer. From the storyteller's perspective, then, what lies between the myth and reality is all that matters. At the end of the day, you see, we prefer to live in the story and not the history. The history is messy and full of holes and uninteresting moments while the story is exciting and larger than life. This, for the record, is why you need a story to fight a story. It's why my break from Christianity was fueled by history, but catalyzed by a story. It was a simple story, one that didn't even involve me. I called it the traffic jam analogy. I imagined the sort of Christian I knew a little too well, the one who seemed to believe that most every event of the day was somehow influenced either by god's benevolent or the devil's malevolent influence. This Christian went to work one morning and was delayed by a traffic jam. Because of the delay, however, the Christian ended up parking and walking in to the office with someone who they'd never met and "witnessed" to them (I put the term in quotes because, honestly, "witnessing" means different things to everyone, from being really polite and holding the door open with the understanding by both parties that they know it's because Jesus dwells in the heart and guides the actions to outright telling of the Gospel and all points in between). This Christian then goes to their midweek Bible study and tells everyone that god put that traffic jam in place specifically so they'd make this divine appointment (yeah, that's an actual term I've heard). Now, lest anyone believes I'm painting a particularly naive or self-involved picture of the Christian mindset, I say again that this story would not exist were it not for the fact that I know people like this. It's this mindset that gave this story its power. But that doesn't make any sense until I tell the second half. See, in this same traffic jam there was a man. This man missed an important appointment because of the traffic jam. I have two versions, one in which he's on his way to see an estranged child who grew tired of waiting and left, another in which he is late for work or a meeting and got fired. The line of reasoning then goes that if god created the traffic jam to allow the Christian above to make a divine appointment, then that also means that, whether by design or ineptitude, god also created greater suffering. I told this story to myself not to make fun of the Christian, but to bring to light the self-centered worldview inherent in the system. See, if god is waiting at your beck and call, you actually become a destructive person without realizing it. You become the center of the universe, largely ignorant of the pain and suffering that the very things you hold dear create in the lives of others. Even if the traffic jam Christian's story is primarily about god's love for that person who received the "witness," and even if said traffic jam Christian doesn't know about the suffering of the guy who lost his job/son/whatever, it makes god and that probably well-meaning Christian culpable for the suffering of another. This, then, is the downfall of the Chosen People. We see it writ large in the Bible. God slaughters the firstborn children of Egypt just to tell a great story about bringing the Israelites out of a captivity. But there's a phrase that's often repeated in the book of Exodus: "then god hardened Pharoah's heart." See, there were a bunch of points when Pharaoh was about to release the Israelites. Then god hardened Pharaoh's heart, he didn't, and a plague of locusts was unleashed o'er the land, or boils broke out or a bunch of firstborn children died. It's a horrible macabre story, one that I think Francine Prose handled beautifully in the Exodus chapter of Killing the Buddha:

Never once, during all those years, during all those Seders, did I think -- or was it pointed out to me -- that those plagues had human victims, that the sufferers from boils and blood, the ones whose houses filled with frogs and locusts were human beings like myself. Around the Seder table, my parents and my relatives -- deeply kind and compassionate people who would have been appalled to learn that a child was in pain or danger -- never seemed to notice that the Egyptian firstborn had once been living human children. And it simply never crossed my mind that the firstborn whom the angel slaughtered could (except for a few particulars of place and time) just as easily have been me.

Big Fish ends with a reconciliation. The son, who for so long had abhorred the father's story, finishes it. He then takes the even more important step and passes it on to the next generation. This story, then, takes on a life of its own and becomes a myth. In effect, although he knew the history, he chose to ignore it and live in the story, as improbable and untrue as it was, because it did carry with it the germ of truth. But think about the lessons of the story for a moment. Yes, it has some wonderful truths, but it carries with it the faults of the myths upon which it was based. The love interest, the wife, takes on the traditional role of the goddess in myth and the damsel in fairy tale. She is there to be wooed and won, but when it's time for another adventure her job is to sit and wait at home. This, after all, is the traditional role of the wife in myth and fairy tale. It's why more traditional branches of the Christian church have such a big problem with feminism in any and all forms, be it the bra-burning feminist stereotype of the women's lib movement, the independent working woman idea that's grown up since then, or even Hillary Clinton running for President. Women are supposed to sit around and wait while the menfolk change the world, after all. Anything else upsets the god-ordained balance of power. It's right there in the Scripture. But what if it's all bullshit? What if the Scripture is just a bunch of fairy tales elevated to the status of eternal truth by the constant repetition of a story that, ultimately, has no more authority than an episode of House? What if, and this is even crazier, that story that's now been elevated to the core of an absolute truth was never supposed to illuminate anything other than a single aspect of life? See, we're all the center of our own life story. Whether it's an individual story or the story of the foundation of a people, the storyteller is really limited. I can only tell my story and guess at the story of another, even if that other is a close friend, relative, or lover. This is where the historian comes in. It's the job of the teller of history to research all sides and try to tell everyone's story. But that, too, is complicated. Historians have only been seen in that role for the last hundred years or so. Before that they generally told the myth. And even at that, humans are lousy witnesses to history. We see what we want to see and can be swayed quite easily by the seduction of a good story, even one that contradicts what we saw with our own eyes. When we reach far enough in to the past, too, we can only find fragments. Religion as we know it today is based largely on things for which there were no direct witnesses, no footnotes, and, at the end of the day, no impartial observers, recorders, or editors. Which, again, is why the historian in me filled in the gaps the storyteller could not. But I'll have to leave that for later.